Tuesday, March 04, 2008

A few weeks ago Bill Clinton said Hillary had to win both Texas and Ohio to stay in the race. As Obamamania has increased that has looked a lot less likely, and many were saying leading Dems would pressure her to withdraw. Jonathan Chait said

for Clinton to pull ahead, she will need to win 57% of the remaining pledged delegates... which would mean getting at least 213 delegates to Obama's 161 -- a 52 delegate advantage. If they net anything below 52 delegates, they fall even further behind.

it is clear that narrow popular vote wins in Texas and Ohio will do very little to improve their nearly impossible path to the nomination. If they do not win Texas and Ohio by healthy double digit margins – and they led by healthy double digit margins as recently as two weeks ago - they will be facing almost impossible odds to reverse the delegate math.

While the Clintons gamely continue to try to move the goal posts, at some point there has to be a reckoning. It is a very simple question – what is their path to secure the nomination? No amount of spin can change the math. We look forward to their tortured answers on Wednesday morning.

The Clinton campaign has insisted that this is a race about delegates. And we agree. The tale of March 4th is not who wins what states but where the delegate battle stands after all the delegate yield for all four of these contests have been allocated.

Actually I believe that even if she loses both (or actually all four) of the races today she will keep going. She is that desperate to get the nomination, and she realizes that Obama has not been seriously confronted o aything but his ability to blow smoke in people's faces and get them enthusiastic about concepts like Hope and Change, and that when they realize what he hopes to do, and how little he has thought through what changes he will make, he will fall faster than the meteoric rate that he rose, and regardless of how many delegates he has now, they will be unlikely to feel that way in August. Whether they will want to turn to Hillary in August is a good question, because the Democratic party has realized what Conservatives have known for years about the ruthlessness of the Clintons, but she will think they have no other place to go, so she will keep her campaign alive.